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Show A . Toast to Science Are You Enjoying Your Slice 1 Of Hot, Buttered Chemicals? 1 ' By Frederick C. Othman WASHINGTON The good old Eastman Kodak Co., which once took a fling at making atom bombs for the government, now is in the business of manufacturing manufac-turing some of the chemical that 20th century bakers insist on putting into bread. I dorrt know how Senator Guy M. Gillette ID., Iowa) feels about this he being an old-fashioned fellow who like hi bread mad of old-fashioned ingredients but the Kodak boya convinced me that their distilled mono-glycerides mono-glycerides are good eating. And also tasty. Soma of the lawgivers long have been concerned over the fact that today it takes a chemist, chem-ist, not a cook, to bake a loaf of bread. The bitterest of these claim that such bread tastes like wallpaper cleaner and Is about as nourishing ss a bale of blotters. What worries Sen. Gillette, chairman of an agriculture agri-culture subcommittee, is whst's going to hsppen to our farmers if the ingredients of bread are to be found in a chemical factory. fac-tory. Calls la Chemist So he called in Dr. Norria Embree, a youthful chemist with a crew haircut representing the Distillation Products Co. of Rochester, N. Y. Thi firm is a subsidiary of the snapshot business. Dr. Embree got started start-ed working on high-vacuum distillation dis-tillation for the production of vitamins, and, well, you know scientists. One thing leads to another. And there he was suddenly sud-denly turning out glycerol mono-esters. mono-esters. This ia the stuff the bakers stir Into the dough to make It tender. The senator said they didn't like the idea of buttering hot toasted chemicsls for breakfast. That's where Dr. Embree went haw! A monoglyceride, said he, is a first cousin to a triglyceride, which is a fat. So he distills cottonseed oil to get mono-glyceride, mono-glyceride, and that's just aa much a nourishing Vegetable product as the oil was in the first place. The lawmakers still shook their heads. 'Stuff Is Everywhere' Dr. Embree said any housewife house-wife making bread at home today with any of the well-known well-known shortenings on the market mar-ket uses monoglycertde, too. The fact is, he said, that recipes for -cake as printed In most of the ladies' magazine specifically call for shortening that contains monoglyceride. Els the result goes flat. But isn't it possible. Senator Gillette demanded, for a lady to bake a cake without using this monoglyceride stuff? Oh. yes, said Dr. Embree. She can use butter, or maybe lard, and by following an old-fashioned recipe, she'll get an excellent excel-lent cake. Aha, said the senators. sena-tors. "But" continued the doctor, "in the baking process in her own stove, some of the fat will turn into monoglyceride."' And when her husband eats a slice of her cake, he said, some mote of the fat will become monoglycetcetera 1 a a 1 d e his stomach. Just Help lag Nature "So when v.t make Inoho-glyceride Inoho-glyceride to mix with the shortening," short-ening," Dr. Embree concluded, "we are just helping nature along." There Is another group of chemicals which th bakers put Into bread, known aa polyethe-lenestereates. polyethe-lenestereates. On of the leading lead-ing manufacturer of these is a gun powder firm. Mostly they come originally from a hole ia the ground namely, an oil well. They give bread a pleasing texture, make It feel soft and' keep it from growing stale. The fellows who make them by the millions of pounds per year don't claim they're nourishing, but do say they are nontoxic. The food and drug administration is investigating in-vestigating this. So is Senator Gillette. He's trying to main-taia main-taia an opaa mind, but the very thought of the stuff doe his appetite no good. . ( |